The Finnish Line for Ryder Cup Rationalization

The American team has been getting its butt kicked in the Ryder Cup lately. And after each thrashing at the hands of the Europeans, American golf fans go through much whining, much hand-wringing and much-hair pulling trying to figure out just what when wrong.

I've long suspected the answer is pretty simple, and thanks to Mikko Ilonen, I'm now convinced that my answer is the right one.

Who is Mikko Ilonen? He's a Finnish golfer who won the Indonesian Open on the European Tour last weekend. Let's repeat: He's a golfer - from Finland - who won a European Tour tournament.

When Finns start winning big-league golf tournaments - as opposed to, say, cross-country skiing, biathlons, ice-fishing competitions or physics contests - you know that golf has reached a new level of popularity across Europe.

And that leads to my simple answer for American troubles in the Ryder Cup: it's all demographics.

Recall my recent post titled, "The Next Generation of Great Golfers Will Come From China." If China makes a point of gaining prominence in golf, I said, that country will start producing many of the greatest golfers in the game. Why? Sheer numbers: China's population is five times larger than that of the U.S., 65 times larger than that of Australia.

For the first 50 years of the Ryder Cup, when it was the U.S. against Great Britain, and then against Great Britain & Ireland, the American side dominated. Why? Sheer numbers. The U.S. population dwarfed that of the U.K.

If golf participation rates in the two countries are roughly equal, then we'd expect the U.S. to dominate the U.K. - the U.S. simply has a much larger pool of golfers to draw from.

It's the same reason why a Class 5A high school football team will almost always beat a Class 2A high school football. Numbers. A larger pool of potential players to draw from leads to teams of better players.

Once the Ryder Cup switched to a U.S. vs. Europe format, the Americans still had the better of it the first few times out. Golf participation in Europe, outside of the U.K., was very low compared to the U.S.

But now? Well, now you have people from Finland winning on the European Tour. The overall golf participation rate in Europe as a whole is still well below that of the U.S. - but it's high enough that Europe, as a whole, probably has a larger pool now from which to draw.

The population of the U.S. is 290 million. The population of Europe is 690 million.

The U.S. will still jump up from time to time to win a Ryder Cup. But the U.S. is now and should forever hereafter be considered an underdog in the Ryder Cup. And the Americans will just keep becoming larger underdogs as golf participation in Europe keeps climbing.

Thanks to Mikko Ilonen, we can say it with certainty: American hegemony in golf is Finnished forever.